WTF? Come on. Desktop shit is just eye candy!
Who cares? Gnome, KDE, wmaker, sawfish, etc. sit on TOP of the OS. We are talking about the OS base, are we not?
What's wrong with Debian's install? It seems straight forward to me. I have installed Debian numerous times on different machines, and have never had a problem.
Just grab root.bin, rescue.bin, driver-[1-3]; put `em on floppies; boot; setup networking; finish installing from net. Simple. Hell, with a CDROM of the dist., it's even easier.
I just don't know what they could do to make it any easier.
There are a number of causes for the effects that cliff is seeing. First, people are just plain lazy. It takes too much effort to figure out the best deal, read the license, comparison shop, etc. Second, as a poster above noted, at least on the consumer side, renting and leasing allows one to get more than one could otherwise afford. Third, people are impatient. Instead of saving in order to buy that nice expensive car, we lease it, so we can have it NOW. Forth, on the coroporate/merchant side, renting/leasing is good business--they get to both keep the merchandise AND "sell" it. Think about cars, for example. A dealer can lease it for a number of years, making quite a bit of money from it, and then sell it as a program car for more than the same used car would go for if sold by an individual who had purchased it new.
This whole trend is scary for another reason: in the software industry, the company gets to keep their product, license it for $$, and then charge for tech support. If the rest of the commercial world follows suit, we might see other companies trying to cut costs in the same way. For example, no longer will the dealer of your leased car take care of maintenance, nor your landlord maintain your apartment, etc. In the future that cost and responsibility will get pushed off onto the consumer as well. In such cases, we will not own our "stuff", will pay someone else for letting us use it, but at the same time hold all of the responsibilities traditionally held to belong to the owner.
I have tried many dot matrix and inkjet printers, the last being the epson stylus 500 I got for about US$100. They all sucked--poor quality, slow. Sure you can use ghostscript with most printers, but hell, my epson took about 6 min per page! Dot matrix printers usually take me 15 min per page to print.
I decided to buy a postscript laser printer, but couldn't find one for a reasonable price. Then I discovered the HP 1100 laserjet. No postscript, but costs under $400. Ghostscript works wonderfully--the 1100 is lj4/5/6 compatible (in fact the 1100 is replacing the lj6 line, according to HP when I called). Talk about fast!!! and awesome output! It's highest res. is 600x600, but that is good enough for my needs. This is the best printer I ever bought. It is so easy to set up too---you don't need to even get Aladdin gs and recompile after tweaking the driver. Just plain awesome.
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WTF? Come on. Desktop shit is just eye candy!
Who cares? Gnome, KDE, wmaker, sawfish, etc. sit on TOP of the OS. We are talking about the OS base, are we not?
What's wrong with Debian's install? It seems straight forward to me. I have installed Debian numerous times on different machines, and have never had a problem.
Just grab root.bin, rescue.bin, driver-[1-3]; put `em on floppies; boot; setup networking; finish installing from net. Simple. Hell, with a CDROM of the dist., it's even easier.
I just don't know what they could do to make it any easier.
There are a number of causes for the effects that cliff is seeing. First, people are just plain lazy. It takes too much effort to figure out the best deal, read the license, comparison shop, etc. Second, as a poster above noted, at least on the consumer side, renting and leasing allows one to get more than one could otherwise afford. Third, people are impatient. Instead of saving in order to buy that nice expensive car, we lease it, so we can have it NOW. Forth, on the coroporate/merchant side, renting/leasing is good business--they get to both keep the merchandise AND "sell" it. Think about cars, for example. A dealer can lease it for a number of years, making quite a bit of money from it, and then sell it as a program car for more than the same used car would go for if sold by an individual who had purchased it new.
This whole trend is scary for another reason: in the software industry, the company gets to keep their product, license it for $$, and then charge for tech support. If the rest of the commercial world follows suit, we might see other companies trying to cut costs in the same way. For example, no longer will the dealer of your leased car take care of maintenance, nor your landlord maintain your apartment, etc. In the future that cost and responsibility will get pushed off onto the consumer as well. In such cases, we will not own our "stuff", will pay someone else for letting us use it, but at the same time hold all of the responsibilities traditionally held to belong to the owner.
I have tried many dot matrix and inkjet printers, the last being the epson stylus 500 I got for
about US$100. They all sucked--poor quality, slow. Sure you can use ghostscript with most printers, but hell, my epson took about 6 min per page! Dot matrix printers usually take me 15 min per page to print.
I decided to buy a postscript laser printer, but couldn't find one for a reasonable price. Then I discovered the HP 1100 laserjet. No postscript, but costs under $400. Ghostscript works wonderfully--the 1100 is lj4/5/6 compatible (in fact the 1100 is replacing the lj6 line, according to HP when I called). Talk about fast!!! and awesome output! It's highest res. is 600x600, but that is good enough for my needs. This is the best printer I ever bought. It is so easy to set up too---you don't need to even get Aladdin gs and recompile after tweaking the driver. Just plain awesome.